‘Delhi most tourist-friendly’

World Travel & Tourism Council–India Initiative (WTTC-II) in association with Hotelivate acknowledged representatives from top states in its recently released survey.

TT BUREAU

Delhi emerged as the consolidated winner in the WTTC-II and Hotelivate’s fifth edition of State Ranking Survey 2017 and was named Destination Leader at the launch event held at The Park, New Delhi. All the Indian states were rated on 11 key parameters including state expenditure on tourism, tourist visits, presence of branded hotel rooms, GSDP per capita, effectiveness of marketing campaign, urbanisation, road and railway infrastructure, aircraft movement, ease of doing business and intangible aspects.

The event was attended by Rashmi Verma, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism and Satyajeet Rajan, Director General, Ministry of Tourism. Also present at the evening were senior representatives from the tourism departments. Since the North East did not fare well as compared to other states owing to limited road and air connectivity, there was a separate list of these states, in which Sikkim was declared the winner in terms of overall performance.

Rajiv Bansal, Chairman, WTTC-II, said, “This event is the culmination of two years of hard work in which we have assessed and ranked states on various metrics of their performance in promoting travel and tourism. We’ve looked at a variety of factors such as literacy, infrastructure, policy initiatives, allocation in the budgets, social programmes, and tried to rank the states in terms of how they fared earlier, what they did earlier and how they look today in comparison.”

Verma said, “It’s a very good initiative as it brings out a sense of competition amongst the states, bringing to fore the strengths and weaknesses of states in the tourism sector. All the states should do a lot of introspection, so that they know which parameters they need to work on. There is a need to give more budget allocation by the states to the tourism sector, so that world-class infrastructure could be developed in all the states.”